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Category Archives: radio

Seoul Urbanism on TBS eFM’s Koreascape: industry and culture grapple in Mullae-dong

Each month I join Kurt Achin, host of Koreascape on Seoul’s English-language radio station TBS eFM, for an exploration of one of Seoul’s urban spaces. This time we go just south of the Han River for a nighttime journey — punctuated by cats, coffee, ukulele riffs, tap dancing, and showers of sparks — through Mullae-dong. There an established generation […]

From my interview archive: four Los Angeles public radio stars

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. “So when is KCRW or KPCC going to give you your own show?” a Los Angeles-based New Yorker writer once asked me just after we’d finished […]

From my interview archive: public radio interviewer and podcast impresario Jesse Thorn

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. There are the people who’ve had an outsized influence on your life, and within that group there are the people who, when you think about […]

Seoul Urbanism on TBS eFM’s Koreascape: Noryangjin fish Market, old and new

Each month I join Kurt Achin, host of Koreascape on Seoul’s English-language radio station TBS eFM, for an exploration of one of Seoul’s urban spaces. This month, along with Koreascape producer Jamie Lee, we pay a visit to the well-known institution of the Noryangjin fish market — or rather, to both of them. After beginning near downtown Seoul in the […]

An English interview about my new Korean podcast on Busan eFM

You may have noticed that I’ve started a new podcast in Korean. Called 콜린의 한국, or Colin’s Korea, it follows very much in the vein of my previous English-language podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture and its public-radio predecessor The Marketplace of Ideas. Each week I sit down somewhere in Seoul (and probably other cities in the future) for about an […]

From my interview archive: critics Clive James and James Wood

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. Clive James called his first book The Metropolitan Critic, which always struck me as a decent job title, if a vague one. But only a vague title […]

From my interview archive: “Undercover Economist” Tim Harford

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. People get deep into things in college: music, movies, drugs, their previously unacknowledged sexual orientation, take your pick. I got deep into economics. And though […]

From my interview archive: Arts & Letters Daily founder Denis Dutton

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. My favorite college class won that designation not just by delivering me my sole A, but by introducing me to Arts & Letters Daily. It lasted the […]

Seoul Urbanism on TBS eFM’s Koreascape: Seoullo 7017 sneak preview

Each month I join Kurt Achin, host of Koreascape on Seoul’s English-language radio station TBS eFM, for an exploration of one of Seoul’s urban spaces. This month, along with Yoon Il Gyu of the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Regeneration Planning Division, we get up above Seoul Station and onto quite possibly the city’s most anticipated urban development of the decade: Seoullo 7017. […]

From my interview archive: Japanologist and Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburō Ōe translator John Nathan

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. A few years before I ever set foot in Asia, I read John Nathan’s memoir Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere, the story of his growing […]